Kate Cayley

Kate Cayley has won the 2026 Toronto Book Award for her debut novel, Property.

Cayley was named the winner of the $20,000 award at an event in Toronto on Nov. 10. She was one of five writers shortlisted for the prize that recognizes works of literary merit inspired by Toronto and its residents. Finalists each receive $2,000.

The novel, published by Coach House Books, takes place over the course of one day in a West End Toronto neighbourhood as two women prepare to welcome guests to their home, putting Cayley in conversation with Virginia Woolf and her 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway.

In their citation, the Toronto Book Award jury called Property “a novel of dazzling interiority” that Woolf might have written had she lived in present-day Toronto. “Cayley skillfully juggles the anxieties, desires, and obsessions of four families living on one unnamed West End street over the course of a single fateful day,” the citation reads. “Addressing contemporary concerns without feeling laden by them and evoking the feeling of living in Toronto without naming a single geographical feature, this very human story demonstrates its ambitions while bookending a singular truth: that no matter what occurs in the legacies we hand to our children, the true inheritors of this city are the rats that burrow underneath it.”

Though the book is Cayley’s first novel, it is not her first published work – she is the author of two short story collections, three poetry collections, and several plays. Property was also a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award and the Governor General’s Literary Awards.